Why?

The other day I called about 8 fitness facilities/clubs in the downtown Toronto area asking if they had an olympic lifting platform and bumper plates. Here was most of the responses;

"What?"
"Excuse me....what?
"You're looking for what?"
"No, we don't have either of those things."
"No."
"No, what is that?"

I actually got transferred to the fitness manager of one highly touted downtown club who said;

"What? What are you looking for?"

"A platform and bumper plates to perform lifts like the clean and jerk, snatch etc."

"Oh...uhhh....yeah we probably have those, yeah we must have those things."

What's sad about this situation to me is that a lot of these places were smaller, more specialized, boutique style and deemed themselves as "high performance" training facilities, boasting that they trained a range of athletes as well as the weekend warrior. You're training athletes and you don't even know what an olympic lifting platform and bumper plates are??